“I was trying to figure out what he was doing,” Harden said. “I was looking at him and he was looking at me. I was figuring out what he was doing, what he was going to say. I was going to shoot it. I was trying to figure out what was going on.”

“I was confused,” Harden continued, according to ESPN’s Kevin Arnovitz. “Like. did the ref call side out of bounds?”

James Harden is sorry, but he’s just thinking of the right words to say. (Screencap via Whitney Medworth of SB Nation)

Nope! It was just that you crumpled a pretty good NBA defender into a tidy bit of recycling to a degree that doesn’t typically happen, eliciting a “whoooooa” from the home team’s fans and kind of stunning everyone into stasis. The game was still on, though.

Personally, I suspect that Harden did know, and that those extra two beats during which he stared at the gelatinous pile that was once his defender, took one hand off the ball, spun it with the other, and waited for a valiant charge by Milos Teodosic before shooting was the product not of surprise, but of wanting to turn a move into A Moment. And that is OK! When you put a quality NBA defender into a trash compactor to this degree, you are within your rights to stunt to whatever degree you see fit … provided you make the shot.